Race/Related: Keeping the spirit of Harlem dance alive

Meet three women who are celebrating, and remixing, Black dance.

View in browser|nytimes.com September 6, 2024 Elliott Jerome Brown Jr. for The New York Times By Imani Perry Meet three women who are celebrating, and remixing, Black dance. Every image here of the dancers Ayodele Casel, LaTasha Barnes and Camille Brown is strikingly contemporary. All artists at the cutting edge of dance today, they regularly perform for rapt audiences. But if you were to cast their angled bodies, brilliant smiles and euphoric turns in black and white, these dancers could almost fit in stills from a night club during the Harlem Renaissance. In motion, these modern women bring to mind historical figures like the Whitman Sisters, who in 1931 took to the stage of the Lafayette Theater in Harlem to put on a raucous, mesmerizing show featuring brilliantly garbed chorus lines, jazz bands, comedians and child performers. According to The Pittsburgh Courier, one of the preeminent African American newspapers of the day, it was the "greatest stage attraction Harlem has ever seen." With the Great Migration from the rural South to the North, West and Midwest in the 20th century, Black dance traditions were remixed and funneled into newly energetic and virtuosic forms like the Charleston, the Lindy Hop and the Jitterbug, and older styles like the Cakewalk and tap evolved. Dance halls, ballrooms and music venues in Black urban centers were filled with hopeful migrants who found freedom in movement despite persistent adversity. The sisters at the forefront As part of what was called the New Negro movement, the four Whitman sisters — Mabel, Essie, Alberta and Alice — stood at the forefront of Black popular culture. Mabel led the company, while Essie was known for her deep and resounding voice, Alberta was an acrobatic "flash" dancer who performed in male drag under the name Bert and the lithe, blond Alice was lauded as one of the greatest tap dancers of her time. In their four-decade run, they introduced the Cakewalk (a high-stepping dance originated by enslaved people on plantations) to the mainstream and gave big breaks to many other Black artists, including tap dancers like Jeni LeGon. In an article in Continuum: The Journal of African Diaspora Drama, Theatre and Performance, Nadine George-Graves, a biographer of the Whitman sisters, wrote that the siblings, once the highest paid act on the Black theater circuit, "pushed buttons and broke barriers left and right." The fact that they aren't better known in the broader dance world demonstrates how many groundbreaking Black female artists have faded into obscurity. At the forefront of the movement to keep dance forms from the era alive stand women like Barnes, Casel and Brown — carrying countless long-forgotten artists of the Harlem Renaissance with them into the present with grace and conviction. Elliott Jerome Brown Jr. for The New York Times Meet the women keeping Black dance alive → FOR MORE ON THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE A visual history of the Harlem Renaissance → The dinner party that started the Harlem Renaissance → Seeing dances of the Harlem Renaissance, in vivid color → EDITORS' PICKS We publish many articles that touch on race. Here are a few you shouldn't miss. Ricardo Nagaoka for The New York Times Fall Preview Daniel Dae Kim Isn't Afraid to Fail In the new Broadway production of "Yellow Face," the "Lost" and "Hawaii Five-0" star is taking a risk. "I am aware," he says, "that people have not usually seen me in this way." 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